Unified Communications

Few things are more important to a business than quality, efficient communication—not only between the company and its clients and customers, but internally between employees. Yet it’s something most organizations struggle with.

Downside of Organized Communication

With the rapid expansion and proliferation of communications technologies and platforms in the digital age, keeping up with your customers and coworkers is more complex. It’s not just phone lines, fax, and e-mail anymore. We’re also talking:

Instant Messaging and Text

Video Conferencing

Mobile Integration

Interactive Whiteboards

Remote Desktop Sharing

Presence Indicators

Digital Calendars

… and a lot more.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow seamlessly integrate all these services, mediums, and technologies? You’d be more productive, and important messages would be less likely to fall through the cracks, right?

What is Unified Communications?

Unified Communications (UC) refers to any communications system or platform that integrates multiple communications technologies or applications within a single interface. You can:

See when your colleagues are available.

Receive notifications whenever they contact you (however they contact you).

This integration helps you get the message faster, and helps you connect with fellow employees more efficiently and seamlessly, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. No more phone tag, no more “did you get that message?”, no more “Is Steve in the office, at his desk, and available to take my call, or did he take the day off?”

Partners

Will I Need a PBX System or Other Expensive Hardware?

Traditional UC infrastructure might include a variety of on-site hardware, such as private branch exchange (PBX) telephone systems. A PBX can offer a lot of customizability (if you have the internal expertise) and used to be the most economical solution for UC purposes. However, it has some major drawbacks.

Most notably, PBX solutions have large up-front costs (capital investment), require time and money to maintain, and they don’t scale well (that is, it’s difficult or expensive to rapidly increase or decrease consumption based on evolving needs). What this means is that you must forecast your needs accurately to avoid significant inefficiencies with over-capacity or under-capacity.

What Is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)?

Today, on-premise PBX based solutions are increasingly becoming phased out in favor of cloud-based solutions. UCaaS tools replace on-site phones, servers, and other physical infrastructure with a virtualized data center hosted by a third-party service provider. Obvious advantages include:

Greater flexibility to add or subtract lines, licenses, etc.

Shifting from a capital investment financing model to an operating cost model with a low monthly fee.

Offloading maintenance and responsibility from your IT staff to a service provider. Since UCaaS systems are sophisticated and always evolving, this represents a substantial savings of money and time for your IT workforce, and helps you get the latest and greatest services faster and with fewer disruptions.

Better network security and uptime in most cases, since the service provider is usually better equipped to avoid and/or recover from cyber-attacks or network failures.

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in most cases.

Get Your Team on the Same Page with TelDesigns

The main point of UC is to make the day-to-day communication and time management of your team easier, faster, and less obtrusive so that they can spend less of their time managing internal systems and more time serving customers and focusing on job activities that directly affect your bottom line.

That’s why having the TelDesigns team in your corner is essential. We work with the leading UC and UCaaS providers and platforms and understand how everything links together. We’ll:

Talk with you in depth about your business and your workforce to determine which integration tools are needed to get your employees working and communicating at peak efficiency.

Design a UC/UCaaS package to meet and exceed your needs, saving you time and money and improving productivity.

Help you implement those solutions.

Help you manage your contracts and research the competition before your contracts expire, so we can continue to refine and improve your services and save you even more.

Is your team communicating as well as it could be? Talk with us about your options in the world of Unified Communications. Reach out today at (616) 965-2030.